Self-Care Is Part of the Human Work We Urgently Need

As I was saying yesterday, here we are at a place where we think we moved mountains in the workplace, but instead, we have

#EmotionalSupportWaterBottle - what more clear expression of the size of the HumanDebt and how deep the EQ crisis really is?

For as long as you have read us we have maintained that “the human work” consists of both team-level human work -through tools and space holders such as our Dashboard- and individual-level human work aka self-care. There is resistance to both. Organisational resistance and employee-level resistance.

As this video acknowledges it is not surprising in the least that people don’t throw themselves into the work with gusto when they have neither the energy nor the training or support from the organisation and when they certainly have seen little more than a game of accountability “monkey throwing” when the organisation even mentions “self-care”.

So isn’t “hydrating” self-care? It really isn’t, the hygiene factors simply can not be counted as part of it. Equally basic human rights can not be counted or seen as favours. The fact that the organisation or your colleagues exhibit respect is not self-care. That they seem empathetic to you needing something is not self-care. Taking a mental health day off when you hit the wall or having to perform any other crisis measures to make yourself feel well is also not self-care.